Conventionally, parents, educators or other responsible persons wishing to control a child's access to the Internet are reduced to taking the child's computer or mobile device away or installing and configuring client-side parental-control software on the child's computer or mobile device to only allow access to certain websites at specified times. Unfortunately, such client-side parental-control software is easily circumvented by tech-savvy children. Indeed, the software may be disabled by removing the software, returning the computer or mobile device to its factory configuration, and other techniques. This renders the parent's job difficult and requires a great deal of day-to-day involvement on the parent's part, rendering such client-side parental-control software less than practical or easy to use, in most cases. Also, devices such as game consoles typically are closed systems that do not allow the end-user to install parental-control software.
Another way to limit a child's access to the Internet is to physically disable the router and/or modem when access is to be disallowed. However, this also prevents all other users from accessing the Internet.
What are desired, therefore, are methods and devices that would enable a parent, guardian or other responsible party to effectively limit and control a child's access to the Internet, in terms of content viewed and sites visited and also in terms of when such access is to be allowed. Such methods and devices should not require the installation and maintenance of client-side parental-control software and should be effective to apply selectable and robust access restrictions to all or selected devices accessing the Internet. Finally, such methods and devices should be relatively tamper-proof by children and should allow flexibility in setting and changing the allowable content and sites, as well as the number of hours or minutes the child is to be allowed to access the Internet.